AAM Library Celebrates National Reading Month With Encyclopedia of Events

6 months

The HCT-Al Ain Men’s campus (AAM) library celebrated the National Reading Month by organizing a host of internal and external events, including the AAM Book Club partnering with the Al Ain Zoo for an interactive E-book Day.

The event was attended by over 1000 local children with the aim of promoting learning through technology and reading e-books. Using the “Quiver” App, which uses 3D augmented reality, the AAM Book Club students showed the school children how create 3D moving images. In line with HCT’s 100% digital move, the AAM library also hosted a workshop titled how to publish your e-book. The aim was to tutor students and members of the public to self-publish their books and literary work using the Amazon Kindle e-book platform or iTunes iBook creator.

AAM Library wanted to encourage staff and students to read more fiction novels. Under the guise of “Blind date with a book” the Library disguised the covers of some fiction books and placed only the first sentence at the front. If participants liked the first sentence, they were free to take the book to keep for free. The idea was to judge a book by its content not its cover; if you judge a book by its cover, you might miss out on an amazing story, Both Arabic and English books were available and the event will run until April.

The AAM Book Club engaged in community outreach by mentoring young students from the Applied Technology High School. To celebrate the National Month of Reading the selected high school students choose a book to read and then visited the AAM campus to discuss the book with the AAM Book club. The book club members spent time with the children in small groups and mentored them on the importance of reading. The children then used the HCT library computers to create their own stories based on the book they had read.

The event was extremely successful and the book club students will continue to act as mentors to the school children as part of their volunteer hours.

To celebrate this AAM Library is using Innovative ways to encourage reading for pleasure. We have added Book Review videos on most fiction books. This is an ongoing project for the Library and we will be adding to this collection, hopefully with actual books reviews from our own students who have read the books.

How it works, find a book from the fiction shelf that has a QR Code at the back. Using a scanner on your iPhone or iPad, scan the QR Code. A YouTube video of young readers will show featuring a review of the book. Be careful as some reviews have spoilers!